background
CTL Engineering is an engineering consulting firm with locations throughout Ohio. Before seeking an e-Construction solution for LPA projects, the company used spreadsheets for project management. Issues with duplicate data entry, travel time, project setup and stakeholder reporting led CTL Engineering to seek a cloud-based real-time solution for project management and inspection. construction
solution
The CTL Engineering team leverages a combination of Infotech software solutions to achieve their goals
- Bid Express® for secure online bidding when the company manages the bidding process for customers
- Appia® for construction management and inspection of LPA projects
results
By using Bid Express and Appia to bid and manage local rental projects, the CTL Engineering team has been able to streamline project setup, eliminate unnecessary travel and data entry, and provide transparency and improved reporting to your customers. Access to a comprehensive and searchable audit trail has also facilitated dispute management, resulting in approximately $100,000 in project savings.
The challenges of paper + spreadsheets
As Warino pointed out during our discussion, the infrastructure construction industry is not far from doing everything on paper, so the associated challenges are still fresh in everyone’s mind. The CTL Engineering team shared their perspective on the most common issues that have arisen from the era of paper and spreadsheet-based construction management and bidding.
About the accuracy of the data:
“That’s a recipe for disaster, when you have multiple people working off the spreadsheet…you get a gap between the data entries or they’re not up to par with the most current version…it’s a cluster to figure out where was the problem.” – Joe Warino
As Warino pointed out, managing a spreadsheet for daily reporting can be a nightmare because of the lack of access to real-time shared information. Ley noted that a project manager could accidentally go into a file and delete something. “It’s really nice when you don’t have to worry about losing something you can’t recreate,” he said.
About travel and time delays:
“You’re killing a day just to go get a piece of paper you need to validate a report.” – Joe Warino
When we had this conversation, each person on the call was in a different city in Ohio. The team highlighted how time-consuming this would be in a disconnected world, where project managers used to go to job sites to get information, or inspectors had to return to an office to enter report data. Ley offered an example of living in Dayton but requiring information from a workplace in Athens, which was a 5-6 hour round trip to the world of paper and spreadsheets.
